But good college professors do a second thing, too: After making it look simple, and orienting the students, these professors will make things complex again. That is, they teach the text again, but this time show the subtleties and depths. They start bringing out the reasons that the text looked complicated in the first place — because it is. The stuff that was stripped away during the simplifying process wasn’t gratuitous padding or obfuscation after all; it was doing work, providing nuance and additional layers of meaning.

A good professor brings the complexities back into the text not as noise, but as music — organized by the broad ideas and structures that were exposed during the simplifying part of teaching.